Altmetrics: What Good are They to Academic Libraries?

Abstract

New knowledge is built on existing knowledge and academic libraries are the primary repositories of existing knowledge for the scholars whose work they support. In these times of belt tightening and budget reductions, it behooves academic libraries to think about how to demonstrate to administrators the value being returned on investments in the library, and to provide scholars with tools to do the same. Traditional means of measuring the quality of new knowledge like the impact factor and h-index are being made richer and more meaningful through the addition of new, social media based alternative metrics. Altmetrics also provide scholars communicating in non-traditional venues like the blogosphere and the Twitterverse with meaningful measures of the impact of their work. In this presentation I will introduce altmetrics, discuss their advantages and disadvantages relative to more traditional metrics, and propose some specific uses to which academic libraries may put altmetrics in support of the transitions now occurring in scholarly communication and thus in academic libraries AbstractNew knowledge is built on existing knowledge and academic libraries are the primary repositories of existing knowledge for the scholars whose work they support. In these times of belt tightening and budget reductions, it behooves academic libraries to think about how to demonstrate to administrators the value being returned on investments in the library, and to provide scholars with tools to do the same. Traditional means of measuring the quality of new knowledge like the impact factor and h-index are being made richer and more meaningful through the addition of new, social media based alternative metrics. Altmetrics also provide scholars communicating in non-traditional venues like the blogosphere and the Twitterverse with meaningful measures of the impact of their work. In this presentation I will introduce altmetrics, discuss their advantages and disadvantages relative to more traditional metrics, and propose some specific uses to which academic libraries may put altmetrics in support of the transitions now occurring in scholarly communication and thus in academic libraries.

A 20-year evaluation of PLAAS research outputs: Impact on the scholarly domain and in social media

“…There is still some debate around a definition of altmetrics 13,19 but it is clear that these metrics complement traditional metrics 20 and provide a broader picture of social impact and visibility of research 21 . Altmetrics are not yet standardised 13,22,23 , which means there is some difficulty in establishing categories and definitions in order to generate consistent and comparable indicators. While more research and refinement is needed in terms of the use and role of these metrics in measuring research impact, it is evident in the literature that the 'growing importance of this emergent application area of social media for research evaluation' 23 cannot be ignored.…”

“…The impact of research on society, and not just within academia, is increasingly viewed as an important aspect of the practice of research and altmetrics is a means of measuring visibility and impact through social media activity. 20,23 Using these tools, we evaluated the impact of the scholarly outputs of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) from 1995 to 2015 using bibliometric and altmetric analyses. A survey was employed as a research instrument to discover the PLAAS researchers' extent of knowledge and use of social media (including Facebook, Twitter, Cite-U-Like, ResearchGate.net and others) in an academic environment.…”

Sharing of retracted COVID-19 articles: an altmetric study

“…Altmetrics are alternative metrics to traditional bibliometric indicators (e.g., citations) that document the impact or dissemination of scholarly works on platforms like social media, online news sites, blogs, and research-sharing sites. Altmetrics are a rapid indicator of the impact of an article within public discourse, as the article can be “cited” on platforms like Twitter on the same day it is published [ 15 ]. Recent studies show that retracted articles published in reputable journals, like Lancet or New England Journal of Medicine, can attain “astronomical” altmetrics scores through being spread on social platforms, especially Twitter [ 16 ].…”

The stability of Twitter metrics: A study on unavailable Twitter mentions of scientific publications

“…The lack of consistency is seen as one of the most noteworthy data quality challenges that all altmetric indicators have to confront (Haustein, 2016). Related research questions have been discussed from both the conceptual and empirical perspectives, since article‐level metrics emerged and were offered by several data providers with different data collection and integration principles (Chamberlain, 2013; Sutton, 2014; Zahedi, Fenner, & Costas, 2015).…”